the ability to bring up virtual machines using a wide range of operating systems.

unrestricted root level control of the virtual machine

Currently Nebula allows it's hpc users to spin up the following operating systems/environment:

Bioconda-CentOS7

CentOS7

CentOS7-atomic

CentOS7-UA

Cirros

Debian8

Debian9

Fedora-Atomic-26

Fedora26

Jupyter-CentOS7

Lamp-CentOS7

RHEL7

Ubuntu16.04-LTS

Ubuntu16.04-LTS-Mate

Ubuntu18.04-LTS

Launching Nebula Instance from Razor

A dedicated queue on Razor, named nebula, has been set up for launching Nebula hosted virtual machines. Jobs to the nebula queue have to be submitted in the interactive mode (qsub -I -q nebula). The virtual machine is created at the beginning of the job, presists while the job is running and is deleted when the job finishes. The name of the job specifies the operating system of the nebula virtual machine (qsub -I -q nebula -N RHEL7). The queue has a maximum walltime of 72 hours, and a default walltime of 24 hours. So the command

qsub -I -q nebula -N RHEL7 -l walltime=72:00:00

would start a virtual machine on Nebula using Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 7 as the operating system, and the machine would run for 3 days, unless the interactive job is terminated earlier. Following is an example of launching an Ubuntu18.04-LTS Virtual machine:

This process should take about 1 minute once the job starts. At this point the virtual machine is created and ready to be used. To log into the VM copy and paste the ssh line from the printout above:

compute1172:pwolinsk:$ ssh -i ~/.nebula/hpc-nebula.pem ubuntu@10.9.1.166
Warning: Permanently added '10.9.1.166' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
Welcome to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.15.0-20-generic x86_64)
* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com
* Management: https://landscape.canonical.com
* Support: https://ubuntu.com/advantage
System information as of Mon May 14 20:50:39 UTC 2018
System load: 0.16 Processes: 83
Usage of /: 9.8% of 9.53GB Users logged in: 0
Memory usage: 11% IP address for ens3: 192.168.0.13
Swap usage: 0%
* Meltdown, Spectre and Ubuntu: What are the attack vectors,
how the fixes work, and everything else you need to know
- https://ubu.one/u2Know
Get cloud support with Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest:
http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud
0 packages can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.
The programs included with the Ubuntu system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.
Ubuntu comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by
applicable law.
To run a command as administrator (user "root"), use "sudo <command>".
See "man sudo_root" for details.
ubuntu@ubuntu18:~$

The default user account for the vm is used to log in. To become root please run: